by Bryan O'Keefe

While EFCA has died down over the past couple of weeks, there was a little-noticed vote last week in the House that demonstrates again organized labor’s priorities.

The vote was over funding for the Office of Labor and Management Standards, an office within the Department of Labor.  I know this doesn’t exactly sound like the most exciting event on the calendar, but the vote was important because OLMS is the office at DOL in charge of union transparency, accountability, and fighting corruption.   

While for most of its existence OLMS was rather non-controversial, the Bush Administration has used the office to aggressively go after union malfeasance.  OLMS led the charge on developing the new LM-2 forms and posting them online.  They also have assisted law enforcement in important union corruption cases.

All of this is usually applauded when it comes to government agencies.  Aren’t enforcement agencies supposed to be exposing corruption, ensuring greater accountability, and improving transparency?  OLMS was particularly successful in these ventures, especially with the LM-2 forms.  Regular rank and file union members can log onto the OLMS website (www.unionreports.gov) and find more information about their unions than ever before.

But not everybody is happy about OLMS’s new role – in particular, labor leaders.  They have fought many of these new rules tooth and nail, even taking the department to federal court over the LM-2 forms (they lost).  So, now with their Democratic allies running Congress, they have decided to slash OLMS’s budget by about 20 percent for next year.   An amendment offered by Rep. John Kline (R-MN) that would have restored funding failed in the House.  

Unfortunately, the budget cuts seem to fit a pattern for organized labor of trying to keep people in the dark about what’s going on with unionization.  Remember back to EFCA --- a major provision in the arbitration provision would have eliminated a workers right to vote on contract terms.  And, of course, the most controversial piece of EFCA would have eliminated workers rights to secret ballots.

Now it seems that organized labor wants to eliminate a workers right to more information about how their union conducts its business and a clean union in general.  

With these types of policies, is it really a mystery why labor union membership in this country is so low?  

Bryan O’Keefe is a labor policy analyst in Washington, DC.